David Kipen

Writer

Kipen is the former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Kipen opened the Boyle Heights bookstore and lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. The former book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen holds a degree in literature from Yale University. He teaches in the UCLA writing program.

Recent Articles

If Rachel Maddow and H.L. Mencken had conceived a child in Los Angeles in 1837, he’d be Francisco P. Ramírez. Paul Bryan Gray’s criminally overlooked “A Clamor for Equality” (published in 2012) tells the story of this trilingual teenage journalism prodigy, who editorialized against police brutality,...

Fellow Dodger fans, I love you, but please leave the room. The rest of you, admit it. You’re just counting the days until the World Series ends. You’re not even shy about asking: When will it all be over? The answer only makes it worse. “Well,” we say, “the series might end as early as Saturday,...

Lots happened in L.A. last night. Lives ended. Lives began. Couples fought, couples made up. A recently transplanted Manhattan-ite said, “All my friends are here!” I probably fell asleep with a book on my chest. Eighty years from now, what record of these events will survive? Partly that depends...

Even now, in this riven country, after this whole entropically hideous year, most Americans still agree on at least one institution. Mercifully, it’s the one that may just save us: the public library. Hear me out. In small towns and large, in red states and blue, libraries poll better across the...

Let’s make this a whole lot easier. After Twain and Fitzgerald, there’s Thomas Pynchon and there’s everybody else. When we ask about the Great American Novel, what we’re really asking is, which of Pynchon’s novels is the most American? For the uninitiated, it may bear mentioning here that Thomas...

Starting Friday, you can board an Expo Line train in downtown Los Angeles and disembark in Santa Monica less than an hour later. If you live or work between Santa Monica and downtown, this new extension is obviously big news. But what if you don’t? Did Santa Monicans get all excited two months...

As if neither man wanted to live in a world without the other, Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616. Or not exactly. They didn't actually succumb on the same day. Shakespeare and Cervantes probably died or were buried almost a fortnight apart, mostly because...